Music & Arts from North Africa, Middle and Near East : the past and the future

mercoledì 5 aprile 2017

El Mahdy Jr.

Born in Sidi Bel Abbes, Algeria, El-Mahdi Rezoug aka El Mahdy Jr. is a music producer dedicated to experiments in the field of electronic music and creator of true digital collages.

At the age of ten years, while civil war rages in Algeria, he moved with his family in Turkey in Konya, a city located in Anatolia.

In Turkey began his musical education by listening to his father's records (old Algerian music, devotional songs, Rai and Jamaican Dub) and starting to get interested in turkish folk heritage, Arabesk in particular. Once started the university, aided by the laptop's roommate, he starts making music mixing jungle and dubstep with samples of old Arab and Turkish music. He is very much influenced by the turkish Serhat Koksal that with his multimedia project 2 / 5BZ has already started in 1986 to investigate the commingling between electronic and popular music.

When the political situation in Algeria is more acceptable El-Mahdi returned home and began working as a translator for a construction company to facilitate dialogue between local Turkish workers and the enterprise. Successive goes in Burkina Faso, where large his wealth of musical knowledge coming into contact with the sounds of the Sahel and the Malian music.

He bedridden after falling with Malaria spends his days working on his laptop and creates songs that will make up his first album which will be released on vinyl in 2013 for the label Boomarm Nationheadquartered in Portland, Oregon.

Titled "The Spirit Of Fucked Up Places" album is based on two specific aesthetic guidelines underlying the El Mahdy philosophy, Dub and sampling.

While many Western artists use oriental sounds like a fetish, without the slightest awareness of their socio-cultural relevance, Rezoug fully understands the traditions that are the basis of the music he sampled. Each sound used comes from a careful examination of the surrounding reality and the songs are just that, sound murals inspired from everyday life and personal experience.The result is an album composed of songs in which are mixed synthetic sounds very 80 years, bass reverberated, Gnawa music, Ottoman devotional songs, Rai, Arabesk and digital distortion.

The feedback received from the album and the need to produce in a more stimulating environment brings El Mahdy Jr. to move steadily in Turkey, in Istanbul this time.

2014 was a prolific year for this young Algerian artist.

Will be published the 10" " Raï Dubs "(always for Boomarm Nation) containing 4 tracks made with samples of old raï songs found on YouTube and on tapes found in car hired,The'Ep "Gasba Grime", published by the Swiss label Danse Noire, where El Mahdy Jr. processes the music of North Africa (the Gasba is a traditional wind instrument of the Maghreb) to an ultra-modern processing and a 7 "containing the songs "Last Breath" and "Last Deal" for the label ZamZam Sounds.

In 2015, for the Discrepant Records released the album titled "Ghost Tapes", made up of two long songs that dig deep into the artist's personal sound space with the intention, according to the author's words, to "interpret the ghosts cultural around us to understand the differences between place and space ''

In 2016 is published the Mixtape printed on cassette from Boomarm Nation entitled "Die Before You Die".A sort of detail behind the scenes containing sounds that will inspire the next job.

Titled "Time to Sell the Golden Teeth" , released in 2017 , is the second work on the long distance for El Mahdy Jr. The album continues his cultural discourse based on a nomadic music evolving sounds that draws inspiration from the cultural background of the author and the difficulty of living in a capitalist world increasingly loud and hostile.